In the field of assessment, many assessments include so-called “constructed response” (CR) items in which the respondent creates his or her response through text, drawings, hand-written numbers, formulas, or other creation. Depending on the task required by the CR item, text responses may be as little as a single punctuation mark. For verbal responses, the task may be as little as a single word or may require a longer response such as a phrase, list, sentence, paragraph, or even an essay. Non-verbal responses may include numbers, proofs, drawings, graphs, lines, etc.
While CR item responses used to be scored by having readers view the responses in an assessment booklet, most CR item responses are scored by having the reader view a digitized image of the student response are described, for example, in Poor, U.S. Pat. No. 5,672,060 (Poor '060), the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference. In this process, the assessment document is first scanned using an optical scanner which captures a digitized image of a portion of the sheet(s) on which the response was created such that the portion includes at least the area containing the response. Subsequently, when it is time to assign a score to the response, a human reader views the captured digital image on a computer monitor and assigns the score based on an evaluation of the displayed image.
The current invention teaches the use of a novel image storage such that a reader can easily distinguish between student marks and pre-printed content. The invention further provides processes whereby specified areas can be hidden or masked, or processes whereby a reader can superimpose a hint to assist with scoring. In fact, the invention provides processes whereby any finite number of “layers” of content can be selectively presented to the reader.